Bad Data Injection in Smart Grid: Attack and Defense Mechanism

We are honoured to present the last Wireless Friday seminar this term:

Date and time: Friday May 31 at 14.30

Speaker: Associate Professor Zhu Han, University of Houston, Texas

Topic: Bad Data Injection in Smart Grid: Attack and Defense Mechanism

Abstract:

In smart grid, the strong coupling between cyber and physical operations makes power systems vulnerable to cyber attacks. If the attackers are able to penetrate into the power grid network and inject the malicious data, the energy management system may produce the false state estimation, which potentially results wrong decisions on billing, power dispatch and erroneous analysis, and even causes a generator self-destruct. In this talk, we discuss two examples from the attacker and defender points of view. Without prior knowledge of the power grid topology, the attacker’s goal is to make inferences through phasor observations. We show that when the system dynamics are small and can be approximated linearly, linear independent component analysis (ICA) can be applied to estimate the Jacobian matrix multiplied by the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of the state variables. The inferred structural information can then be used to launch unobservable attacks. For defense strategy, we propose the proposed “adaptive CUSUM algorithm”, and each recursion comprises two interleaved stages: Stage 1 introduces the linear unknown parameter test, and Stage 2 applies the multi-thread CUSUM algorithm for quickest change detection. The proposed scheme is able to determine the possible existence of adversary at the control center as quickly as possible without violating the given constraints such as a certain level of detection accuracy and false alarm.

Zhu Han:

Zhu Han received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. From 2000 to 2002, he was an R&D Engineer of JDSU, Germantown, Maryland. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland. From 2006 to 2008, he was an assistant professor in Boise State University, Idaho. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Houston, Texas. His research interests include wireless resource allocation and management, wireless communications and networking, game theory, wireless multimedia, and security. Dr. Han is an NSF CAREER award recipient 2010. Dr. Han has 7 IEEE conference best paper awards, and winner of Fred W. Ellersick Prize 2011.

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Our aim is that Wireless@kth shall be a meeting place for the wireless world. Each year we organize a range of activities such as ”Wireless Friday seminars”, national and international workshops and conferences, partner meetings and networking events.

Examples of recent major events:

2017: Wireless@kth Annual Partner meeting (April 20), : high-profile meeting for wireless and mobile industry R&D leaders and leading academics together. At this meetmeeting the research agenda for the next year is set.

Smaller players/SMEs may also make extensive use of the Wireless@kth meeting place where they can network with other players and stay updated with technology trends. However, they can also participate in seed research projects that have the character of “technical feasibility studies”.

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